Desmond MacCarthy

Samuel Butler, perhaps the most original English thinker of the nineteenth century, was born near Bingham, Nottinghamshire, just a hundred years ago - on December 4, 1835. Grandson of a Bishop of Lichfield (whose life he wrote); Anglican lay reader; New Zealand sheep-breeder; painter - one of his pictures is now in the Tate Gallery; agnostic pamphleteer; Swift-like satirist; antagonist of Darwin; composer; art-critic; translator of Homer - he was a limitless, unfathomable man.

We remember him today not for his many-sidedness nor for his freakish theories (for instance, his contention that the 'Odyssey' was written by a woman), but as the author of the fantastic 'Erewhon', the brilliant, bitter, autobiographical novel 'The Way of All Flesh', and the pregnant aphorisms of the 'Notebooks '. Desmond MacCarthy has already expressed the view elsewhere that 'Samuel Butler was an earlier prophet of that Evolutionary Religion which is being preached by Shaw and Wells'.